... anybody who has spent time with cameras and photographs knows that images, like gravestone rubbings, are no more than impressions of the truth.

I realized that if I wanted to truly talk about vastness and the sublime and scale and the West - recurrent themes in my overall work - I needed to engage with the vast ocean that is Los Angeles.

Los Angeles functions for me as a kind of holy template. It is postwar America.

I struggle against photography. I struggle against the fact that it is silent, that it is just a piece of paper on the wall, often presented in a tedious white matt frame.

I come at a subject from a profoundly photographic level. I am not interested in pictures that ultimately don't work as pictures.

What better way to actually deal with L.A. than to get above it and engage with the horizontality and scale of the basin itself?

I have a profound passion for the act of flying. It's very freeing, with an intense physicality, but it also gives an Olympian, god's-eye view, which fuels a larger cerebral and structural analysis.

Flying was certainly formative for me; I have a deep and lasting ease with it as a result.

I think we need to develop a powerful dose of tolerance to understand each other’s humanness. None of us is perfect.

Arrogance will kill anything and everything you ever possibly have.

I hated the bangs in the war: I always felt a silent war would be more tolerable.

We talk of wild animals, but the wildest animal is man.

I can't imagine what it would be like being James Bond 24 hours. That must be exhausting.

I don't really believe in anything special, but I respect God. I go to church sometimes, but not often.

I want to tell a story that makes the reader always want to see what will happen next.

There's a little wire work, which is so much fun. You can fly, it's amazing. But I've had to mostly just sort of kung fu, you know, ground work. Footwork and stuff like that.

It is divinity that shapes, not only your ends, but also your acts, your words and thoughts.